Kerala model for climate resilience: As extreme weather events become more frequent and devastating, India must urgently rethink how it prepares for and responds to climate-related disasters. Coastal states like Kerala have been at the receiving end of relentless floods, landslides, and sea erosion in recent years. But beyond the calamities, Kerala also offers a rare success story: a model of climate resilience rooted in community-led planning, ecological restoration, and — most crucially — women’s empowerment in governance and disaster response.
With rising sea levels projected to reach up to 1.1 metres by the end of the century, as per the IPCC AR7 Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, India’s vulnerability is no longer theoretical. Yet most national and state-level disaster management plans continue to underutilise one of the country’s greatest assets — its women. Kerala, on the other hand, has actively integrated women into climate planning and local governance. The rest of India must follow suit.
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Kerala model in disaster response
Kerala’s relatively successful responses to multiple floods and landslides since 2018 can be partially attributed to its long-standing emphasis on decentralised governance. Its Kudumbashree programme — one of the world’s largest women-led community networks — has played a crucial role in evacuation, relief distribution, and community resilience planning.
With over 4.5 million members, Kudumbashree has been a vital conduit for both information dissemination and grassroots mobilisation. During the 2018 and 2019 floods, these women not only ensured food and medicine reached vulnerable families, but also helped in data collection, shelter coordination, and public health monitoring. Their intimate local knowledge and trust within communities made their involvement far more effective than top-down bureaucratic mechanisms.
Contrast this with disaster-hit areas in other states, where absence of community-led planning often results in delays, inefficiencies, and inequitable relief distribution. In many cases, women are treated merely as victims, not as agents of recovery.
Ecological destruction demands gender-sensitive planning
Kerala’s unique topography — the steep valleys between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea — makes it extremely vulnerable to climate-induced disasters. Deforestation, quarrying, and construction in ecologically sensitive zones have aggravated this vulnerability. According to state data, over 13,000 sites are now landslip-prone and another 17,000 at risk of landslides. Wayanad and Idukki alone saw 3,000 such events during the 2018 floods.
More than 80% of paddy fields that once acted as natural flood buffers have been destroyed. Mangroves, once covering 720 sq km of Kerala’s coast, now survive on a mere 24 sq km. Unchecked quarrying in hill districts continues despite regulatory bans.
Yet, amidst this ecological crisis, Kerala’s policy response has shown promise. Its Ecorestoration Policy (2021) and “room-for-rivers” campaign reflect a genuine intent to realign infrastructure and development with climate imperatives. Importantly, several of these programmes are being executed with active involvement of women’s self-help groups. From mangrove restoration to afforestation and flood-risk mapping, women have become central to both implementation and monitoring.
Empowering women in local self-government
By 2050, 80% of Kerala will be urbanised, mirroring a global trend where 70% of the world’s population will live in urban centres. Urban climate resilience, therefore, is no longer a luxury — it is a survival necessity.
At the Kerala Urban Conclave in September 2025, David Simon and other experts highlighted the urgent need for multilevel governance. One of the key insights: resilience must be planned across political, ecological, and social scales—and cannot be engineered solely through infrastructure.
Kerala’s local self-government department, through its gender budgeting and planning cells, has empowered elected women representatives in panchayats and municipalities to play pivotal roles in urban resilience. These representatives are not token inclusions; they actively shape drainage plans, oversee solid waste management, and participate in hazard zoning decisions.
According to the World Institute of Sustainable Energy (WISE), Kerala’s planning architecture offers a blueprint for other states: gender inclusion, decentralised planning, and climate mainstreaming must converge for effective governance.
Mainstreaming gender in national climate policy
India’s National Disaster Management Authority and State Disaster Management Authorities have, so far, failed to institutionalise gender as a cross-cutting priority. Women continue to be under-represented in planning bodies, relief missions, and rehabilitation schemes. This is despite multiple studies by UNDP and IFRC highlighting that women suffer disproportionately from climate disasters, yet are also the most effective responders when given agency.
Kerala’s experience confirms this. From riverbank restorations to early warning systems and bio-fencing of flood plains, women have spearheaded projects that are low-cost, sustainable, and socially embedded. In many ways, Kerala is already practising what international frameworks like the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and UN Women’s Gender Equality and Climate Change Policy advocate.
Mainstreaming gender into climate adaptation means more than just increasing female representation. It requires making women co-authors of the policies, budget decisions, and institutional mechanisms that govern climate response.
A Forward-Looking Climate Governance Agenda
The Kerala model offers several replicable lessons for the rest of India:
Establish gender-responsive climate units: Every state must set up dedicated gender-responsive climate action units within SDMAs and urban planning departments, staffed with trained women professionals and elected representatives.
Scale up women-led restoration projects: Programmes like Kudumbashree should be replicated in other vulnerable states — Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, and Gujarat. These groups can lead mangrove restoration, riverbank stabilisation, and urban drainage maintenance under MGNREGA.
Revamp legal frameworks: Outdated land-use policies, forest regulations, and building codes must be updated to reflect climate vulnerabilities and integrate gender priorities.
Enforce climate accountability: A centralised real-time flood monitoring system, especially in high-risk zones, should be complemented with community feedback loops managed by women-led local bodies.
Create a national climate fund for women-led adaptation: Inspired by Kerala’s ecosystem-focused models, the Union Government must earmark a portion of its climate budget for women-run mitigation and adaptation projects, with transparent audits and localised impact assessments.
India’s current trajectory of disaster governance, largely driven by infrastructure-heavy responses, is both expensive and exclusionary. A climate-resilient India must move beyond engineering fixes and embrace community-driven, inclusive, and gender-sensitive planning.
Kerala has made a head start. Its embrace of women as equal partners in climate planning and disaster governance offers a model not just for India’s coastal states but for the country as a whole. The time to act is now — before the next flood, landslide, or cyclone reminds us once again that our most under-utilised resource in crisis is also our most resilient: our women.